Built to Burn - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 214

Arizona national forests burned area
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
Fires over 10 acresotal acres burned
FIGURE 11.3
After declining to minimum in the 1930s, both large fires and burned area have increased, dramatically in the
past two decades. The reasons are several, including drought, availability of wildland fuels, changes in land use,
and reforms in fire policy and practice that encourage more burning. (Data from U.S. Forest Service, Region 3.)
fire, and hurricanes battering barrier islands. In the West, the resulting landscape quilt
stitches houses to fire-prone public wildland. Such places are primed to burn. 5
The urban and the wild—their compound is a kind of environmental nitroglycerine,
and when shaken by drought, wind, or spark, they explode. Fire is not alone: sprawl inter-
breeds with whatever indigenous hazards exist; but fire is the most visible. Over the past
two decades the number of structures burned in this intermixed zone (or “wildland/
urban interface,” as officialdom prefers to call it) has escalated, the irrational exuberance
of homeowners having helped the NASDAQ Nineties to create a bull market for burning.
The subprime loans that fueled Wall Street's conflagration in 2008 expressed themselves
equally on the land. Even more, those enclaves have projected a vast fire-protectorate of
urban-centered values across the countryside (e.g., exurbanites particularly loath smoke).
In the nineteenth century, Bernhard Fernow denounced America's rural fire scene as one
of “bad habits and loose morals.” Today we might restate him to read one of “bad habits
and loose money.”*
11.3 Wildfires
Since 1990 the issue has dominated the national discourse on fire. California looms over
the national statistics: It stands by itself in the economics of fire losses and costs. With 85%
of the houses burned in the United States since 1990, California is to fire what Florida is to
hurricanes. When politicians and pundits speak of America's “fire problem,” this is usu-
ally what they mean, and it is why fire matters just now to the public at large, even though
its practical domain lies within a single state (Figures 11.4 and 11.5). 5
Still, the Southwest is in the thick of it. Its mix of public and private lands makes “sprawl,”
a perhaps less useful descriptor than “splash.” The recolonizing supernova is blasting
exurban enclaves from the Sonoran Desert to the Mogollon Rim to the flanks of Mount
* Fernow, quoted in Rodgers III. 6